My Crafty Space ~ Coloring Media Storage

Happy Wednesday Everyone! Hope your day is going well :)

I have been slowly but surely over-hauling my crafty space. Well, maybe over-hauling is too large a term. It is more like tweeking and perfecting systems that for the most part, work well for me. I shared my Craft Studio space with you a while back. You can see it in this post ~here~

This is how I used to have things. I had most of my coloring media together. My Copics, water-color pencils, paint-brushes, prisma-color pencils and assorted blending stubs. I also had all my ink-pads except my Distress Inks there along with the books that store my metal dies.

Here is what it looked like:

A few months or so ago, I decided to change how I store my Copics and I also needed to find a better solution for my growing collection of metal dies and ink pads, oh my!

Today I am going to share my Copic Solution. As you can see in the above photograph, I stored my Copics grouped together in color families in plastic Rubbermaid X cubes. I bought them about 4 years ago from Bureau En Gros (Staples in the rest of Canada) but they no longer carry them. You may still be able to get them on ebay or Amazon. What I loved about them was that it was easy to put them away once I was done with them and I used to get the boys to do it for me. I also loved that I could store my color families together but then, Copic introduced new marker colors and suddenly I had too many “E” and “B” markers to fit comfortably and I had to combine families to make it work. The other drawback was that I did have to search for a certain marker from time to time as they weren’t really in any order other than family.

Here is my solution. Please disregard the state of my markers. Some of my most often used ones need to be cleaned up a wee bit.

These marker holders are made by La-La Land Craft Stamps and as soon as Irina started showing us the prototypes, I knew that I wanted them. First of all,  they are so PRETTY!  Look at all the detailed filigrees.

They are made of heavy duty paperboard that is very sturdy. The Sketch Marker holder holds 120 sketch markers (it will also hold Ciaos if you have a mix of types). There is also a holder designed for Ciao markers that holds 95 Ciaos.

These holders ship to you flat and you do need to assemble them and there is a wee bit of gluing involved but there is a video ~here~ that shows you how to do it. It was pretty simple and there were quickly done. So that mine would match my studio space, I spray painted mine using Krylon Indoor/Outdoor spray paint in Satin Ivory.I was careful not to over-spray since I didn’t want the boards to warp. I painted them PRIOR to gluing them together.

Now, all my markers are stored according to their color families AND in numerical order. Sigh.  This makes me very happy. They look lovely sitting on your desk as you see here. In the end, to save space on my desk, I stacked them horizontally on my shelf:

I moved all my Stampin’Up inks to a cupboard directly below this and they are stored one on top of each other in a plastic crate. They are still accessible but moving them allowed me to add the rest of my Hero Art Shadow inks and Jenni Bowlin inks. The holder for my Prisma-color pencils was a gift from my son :)

You may also have noticed the matching holder I have for my Distress Ink markers! I love this one. It is super portable and I can just grab the whole thing and lay it on my desk when I need them. The Distress Marker Holder holds 37 distress ink markers (or similiar type).

I do need to point out that I am on the La-La Land Craft Design Team but I can truthfully say that I am in love with this system and that I have been working with it for almost 2 months and have no complaints :)

I will share my Die storage system and other tweeks to my  craft organization in future posts!

Hugs Jeanette xxo